Catalogue Final

A solo exhibion of ADEEL UZ ZAFAR MONOMANIA (mn-mn-, -mny) A paral insanity in which psychoc thinking is conned to one subject or group of subjects. An excessive interest in or enthusiasm for a single thing, idea, or the like; obsession. Hybrid Companions 04 Foreword Andrew Shea Director/Curator, Aicon Gallery, New York The term monomania can be dened as “an excessive interest or enthusiasm for a single thing or idea; conicng bit of informaon thrown at them into some kind of cohesive recognizable form. But once they’ve obsession.” In this sense, the term relates to the work of Adeel uz Zafar both in terms of his consistently recurring given birth to these new heavenly bodies, they are monstrous, mutated, wounded, or trapped, and all the other subject maer (children’s toys eerily wrapped in gauze or bandages) and his now-signature reducve technique lights in the universe have gone out. of scraping away at a black latex surface line by line to give rise to seemingly three-dimensional gures. This Zafar’s creaons now sit alone, although most seem unaware of this due to the bandages covering their eyes. technique, central to Zafar’s pracce, allows him to build up intricately textured forms through a simple acon However, the postures of many of these gures seem clearly ready and excited for interacon. In Antagonist 1 of mark-making repeated thousands of mes. The resulng gures, whatever deeper meaning they may hold, / Dragon, the creature stands with its bandaged sts in the air, like a boxer ready to face an opponent who will immediately strike the viewer as the product of obsession. never enter the ring, while Antagonist 2 / Demon crouches, ready to pounce into a melee that is not to be. Oen mes, individuals who nd themselves xated on a single subject, be it a concept, a thing, or a person, are Meanwhile on the side of the ‘good guys’, Protagonist 1 / Mickey oats hopefully through his empty universe, capable of creang vastly intricate systems of symbolism and mythology around it that are only jusable unto arms perpetually outstretched for a hug he’ll never give or receive. It is a desperate and lonely world we’re themselves. Imagine entering the hermec apartment of a chronically obsessed celebrity-stalker and what one peering into, reecve of the all too increasingly common feeling of isolaon many of us can sense, even as we might nd inside. In a similar way, through his obsessions both in terms of theme and technique, Zafar is building connue to be informed that the world is becoming ever more connected. Indeed, even when Adeel’s characters a world. It is a world populated with good guys and bad guys, characters both familiar and alien, and a host of occasionally manage to get a peek through their bandages at the world around them, they likely wish they mutated creatures exisng somewhere in between. And slowly but surely these monomaniacal tendencies are hadn’t. There is a sort of existenal horror expressed in the single giant staring eye of Antagonist 3 / Monster, giving rise to a universe with deeply complex implications for both its inhabitants and their viewers. while Protagonist 2 / Kong seems quite posively on the verge of tears upon geng a glimpse of the empness that surrounds him. Others, including the arst himself, have hinted at this same conclusion; that a kind of cosmos is being created as each new work is brought into the world. But even a cosmos must have an origin. Or at least most believe it At the end of such a reading, these driing creatures seem to have been created to either perpetually ponder must. In this sense, Zafar’s ‘scratch and reveal’ technique, stumbled upon while working with photographic the purpose of their existence in a world they cannot clearly see or understand, or be cursed with the sight and paper and limited tools in the isolated regions of Northern Pakistan, can be taken as a ‘big bang’ in terms of knowledge of the true void in which they exist. Born out of an obsession with a revelatory yet single arsc method and medium; the sudden opening of a new gateway to creaon. However, the substance and subjects technique, the once familiar inhabitants of Zafar’s strange and lonely universe are ulmately le with nothing of Zafar’s new world would be the products not of the spectacular chaos following the astronomical Big Bang, to contemplate or understand outside of themselves. They have become the trapped subjects of their own but rather the product of a slow, meditave, obsessive persistence to create life. Ironically, neither path seems monomania. to have resulted in its respecve universe fully making sense or imparng meaning to its inhabitants more readily than the other. Both worlds have frequently ended up populated with desperate individuals who oen nd themselves psychologically, historically, or, in the case of Zafar’s characters, literally adri. Zafar’s subjects, usually modeled on familiar childhood toys and popular characters, oat through their lonely universe. They seem completely oblivious to one another due either to the bandages covering their eyes or the black voids in which they nd themselves. Thus, although these characters evidently exist in the same mythological pantheon of our collecve memories, they appear doomed to never meet one another; to never enact the dramac bales, alliances and tragedies for which they’ve been created. Not only do the conicts between the perceived good actors and bad actors in this world go perpetually unresolved, they are never even given a true chance at understanding each other or themselves. Here Zafar’s world seems a heightened metaphor for our now global ideological, cultural, and sociopolical conicts and the potenal consequences of giving in to the pessimism it can somemes breed. A further pictorial and conceptual analogy can be drawn between Zafar’s pracce and our own cosmos if one steps back and seeks an explanaon of these bizarre creatures by viewing them for a moment as constellaon- like. In doing so, one can quickly realize that the stargazers we might envision discerning such manic and mutated forms in the night sky are not capable of stopping aer imagining a simple outline of a familiar living creature, as our ancestors have since anquity. Instead, we can imagine them possessed by a need to connect every other discernable point of light contained within that outline, through thousands upon thousands of interwoven lines. These constellaons are the obsessive compulsive products of individuals enmeshed in both increasingly fragmented and increasingly globalized sociees, francally aempng to understand their inner and outer worlds by connecng every dot they come across; by desperately trying to force every complex and 06 09 Protagonist 1 / Mickey 36 x 30 Inches / 91.44 x 76.2 cm 2015 08 Protagonist 2 / Kong 36 x 30 Inches / 91.44 x 76.2 cm 2015 10 Antagonist 1 / Dragon 49 x 60 Inches / 124.46 x 152.4 cm 2015 12 16 Antagonist/Demon Gemma Sharpe Appraisals of Adeel Uz Zafar’s work generally draw parallels to miniature painng in Pakistan and its precise procedural quality, or to the pain of the country, perpetually wrapped in metaphorical and literal bandages alike to those that wrap Zafar’s mischievous forms. Other readings aend to Zafar’s early-career pracce as an illustrator, or to the global ubiquity of his referents (cartoon characters and toys). However, his work’s obvious parallel with Pop Art (along with the fact that he shares an early career trajectory with a number of Pop arsts), have been less discussed, though assessments and reassessments of Pop Art are very much on the horizon as I write these words, with two ‘Global Pop’ exhibions on display at the Tate Modern in London and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis expanding its canon beyond the usual suspects. Perhaps an understanding of Zafar’s work aer the legacy of Pop has seemed too obvious to be undertaken. Or perhaps Pop Art is too far past, held back to the 1960s and the high (or low) point of the American Century, American exceponalism and its capitalist roar. Pop seemed to oer so much, and so clearly. As Susan Sontag put it in her 1966 essay ‘Against Interpretaon’, Pop Art used a content so blatant and “what it is” that in the end it becomes uninterpretable, with nothing to interpret. Pop Art has been openly and tacitly denigrated for this character, far more than its historical partner in Minimalism, which was similarly against interpretaon, albeit through a decit of content rather than Pop Art’s excess of it. Yet Pop was a slippery movement, (or series of movements). Its darker corners were quickly buried and easily absorbed by its bright, slick, trivial and occasionally chauvinist forms, and to think of Pop Art as merely Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenberg and the New York cohort represents a narrow cut of its canon, as recent exhibions – more or less successfully – have tried to argue. If we expand that canon to include its internaonal peers – from Britain and France to Brazil and Japan – the ‘movement’ begins to surpass comic strips, beef burgers, and Marylyn portraits. And just as arsts outside North America frequently used the Pop aesthec to subvert American icons and commercial excesses, so too were the arsts that we associate with its inner ‘core’. To take two examples: Lichtenstein was deploying the comic book format thirty years aer its Golden Age, and Warhol’s famous Marilyn prints were begun in response to Monroe’s unmely death.

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